Three Early Documentaries About the South That You Should See
As Allison Graham writes in her entry on Documentary Film in the Media Volume of The New Enclypodia of Southern Culture, “Before the 1980s, the ‘documentary South’ existed primarily as a benighted setting for televised examinainations of poverty and political disgrace — a secondary wasteland, in a sense, within the ‘vast wasteland’ of television itself” (51). One might quibble with whether or not television still constitutes the wasteland of Newton Minnow’s famous speech; however, his point might remain that when television is good, nothing is better, but when it is bad, nothing is worse. This pronouncement does not necessarily apply to these three films, all produced ahead of Minnow’s speech and not created as television exposés.
The first is Pare Lorentz’s The River (1938). As Graham notes, it was produced by the U.S. Farm Security Administration. The River offers a progressive critique of industry’s effects on the Mississippi River. It notes the environmental degredation produced by various economic enterprises and how these have material effects for people who work as tenant farmers, producing cash crops that exacerbate the problems. It also serves as an advertisement for the Tennessee Valley Authority’s plans to correct these issues through government-funded measures.
The next film is Robert Flaherty’s Louisiana Story (1948). Though it is frequently identified as a documentary film about a young Cajun boy, it is in fact mostly fictional — something more of a docudrama. As Graham outlines, it appears today as “a sadly ironic ode to its benefactor, the Standard Oil Company” (51). Following the main “character,” Alexander Napoleon Ulysses Le Tour, the film might remind us of today’s plethora of Cajun-based “scripted” reality television programs such as Swamp People, Duck Dynasty, Cajun Justice, or Bayou Billionaires. Each of these seemingly “low-brow,” “wasteland”contemporary television spectacles might draw their genealogy from Flaherty’s work as we consider the stakes of oil production, environmental concerns, poverty, and cultural exoticism as depicted in media portraits of Lousiana’s swamps.
Last, we have a film from George Stoney, All My Babies (1952), which follows Georgia midwife, Mary Franis Hill Coley. Sponsored by the Georgia Department of Public Health, the documentary chronicles the period shortly before the end of lay midwifery. There’s been a lot of interest in the film over the last few years, as it was the subject of an exhibit at Duke University through the Center for Documentary Studies, and it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation. It is of special interest to those interested in the history of women’s healthcare, the medical humanities, African American medical practices, and rural southern communities.
If you’ve never seen these films, then I hope you enjoy them. If you have watched them previously, then I hope you’ll see something new in these spectacular early examples of southern documentary. I remain amazed at how applicable many of the lessons from these films remain for the region today — industrial exploitation, environmental degradation, poverty, battles over women’s access to healthcare, just to name a few.
Many thanks to Allison Graham for bringing everyone’s attention to this material. If you’re interested in all things southern and media, I encourage you to check out Volume 18 of The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. It’s a gem.
